Roadworks: Processional Performance in the New Millennium will examine contemporary artistic and cultural practices that are increasingly engaging in parades, masquerades, and processions, and with civic rituals, public ceremonials, and historical reenactments. Under their various guises, these forms of mass address coalesce in what Tancons terms “processional performance.” Roadworks shows how processional performance, in overt or covert ways, in celebration or in mourning, thickens the ranks of the retinue of resistance and resilience that puts side by side those who choose to take to the streets and those who are forced on the road. The book will show how the transition from the historical dismissal of wandering artworks by the West to the embrace of roadworks by the rest might position processional performance as an artistic and curatorial articulation of globalizing conditions of diasporization—of bodies, objects, matter, and ideas.
Claire Tancons is a curator, writer, and researcher interested in the postcolonial politics of art production and exhibition. She co-curated EN MAS’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean—a cross-Caribbean performance commissions series, touring exhibition,[comma] and publication project—and Hétéronomonde, the inaugural edition of the Tout-Monde Caribbean Festival in Miami, and curated Up Hill Down Hall in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern. She was artistic director of Tide by Side for the inauguration of Faena Forum Miami Beach, and etcetera: a civic ritual for Printemps de Septembre in Toulouse, France, and has curated for biennials including Prospect New Orleans, the Gwangju, Cape Town, Bénin, and Göteborg biennials and, currently, the Sharjah Biennial, for which she is one of three curators. Her curatorial writing and practice have been anthologized in In Terms of Performance (Pew Center for Arts and Heritage and University of California, Berkeley, 2016), The New Curator (Laurence King Publishing, 2016), and Perform, Experience, Re-live: BMW Tate Live Program (Tate Publishing, 2016). She conducted courses, seminars, and tutorials at IUAV University in Venice, University Arts London, and CuratorLab in Stockholm. She is also the recipient of fellowships, grants, and awards from the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Prince Claus Fund, the Foundation for Arts Initiatives, and the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation.